Response to “Web Design Issues when Searching for Information in a Small Screen Display,” by Loel Kim and Michael J. Abers in The University of Memphis, 2001.
Kim and Abers have conducted this study long before the first smartphone ever came to existence. They call a small screen device a “personal digital assistant” (PDA), because they believed that soon these small handheld devices will “supplant the desktop computer as ubiquitous technology,” which is exactly how our society today has turned out. They were wondering if a PDA would be as efficient as a web interface in offering information that a user searches for. They had 120 participants go through a series of cases where a PDA screen, which a user can scroll, will have information that a user is told to search for in the beginning, middle, and end of a textual article, as the two conductors believed that finding information in the middle and end would show more trouble. They hypothesized that
1) Users will have more errors on a PDA,
2) Users will take more time searching on a PDA,
3) Users will experience more difficulty locating information in the middle of end of pages on a PDA, and
4) Users will experience more difficulty locating textual information than numerical statistics on a PDA.
Ignoring the complexity of the design a web page must go through to accommodate a small screen like a PDA, Kim and Abers found that users did not show any cases of making errors (such as finding the wrong information or clicking the wrong link by accident) on a PDA, as they were as efficient in searching as when they would be on a computer. They were right in that it did take longer to search for information on a PDA, but it mattered more about the “size” of information the user had to look for, such as word or phrase length. Scrolling did not slow down the users from finding information at the end: the middle was the only problem. And for the last hypothesis, no distinctions were made between finding textual and numerical data. Kim and Abers realized that differences in designing information did not matter, for it was more about the high data spread across the page. The points that Kim and Abers have made surely apply to what our group is designing today.
I’ve decided to respond to this paper because, although it is outdated, it still very much relates to an important quality in our project: searching for a specific information. We’re going to have the have the users go through exhibits and artworks to find specific information. This has always been on my mind, especially when we were building our prototype: What is the best way to spread out information? Would it be in sections across the page? Would it be an inlay list? Would it be in categories that users will have to sift through? The list inlay is something that I want to implement in our prototype, because it would be extremely useful and have the generic data be very accessible to the curators. But I realize that finding the best design for this is not going to be the only solution. As Kim and Abers pointed out, our situation focuses more on how much information we need and what the users will be looking for. What are we going to choose to display in our product? We are going to need information about exhibits and artworks because our data visualizations depend on them. So we have to focus on our data visualizations, and what we can prioritize in the data. Figuring this out would be a much faster process if we had a team of curators that can help us understand what data they would look for in such an app like heART. But that being said, something that this paper tried to figure out was whether or not textual information was harder to find than numerical statistics. And althought they didn’t get a sufficient result, I believe we avoid that situation by combining those two factors together. Our project has many ways to display data by not just words, but charts and graphs. Not any charts and graphs that intimidate people when they first see them–they would be fun and interactive, as well as easy to read and very accessible. We don’t have to worry about users skimming over information because they would be too eye-popping.
The study is here.